Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL

Friday, February 13, 2009

This is a term invented by Richard Feynman that I linked into a few days ago. The "cargo cults" happened in the south seas when at the end of WW2 the Americans went home & supplies of Coca-cola, comic books etc for the natives dried up. The natives decided to build their own airfields etc out of bamboo & hope they would fool the great sky gods into resuming deliveries. Hence cargo cult science is where the "scientist" puts on a white coat but omits to do real experiments, theory testing & general scientific method.

Catastrophic global warming is a common hunting ground. There is no actual evidence that it is happening but a lot of flashy film of people in white coats & computer programmes (repeatedly found to be nonsense or using nonsense data) & wholly corrupt fascists like Monty Don on Question Time yesterday saying 99% of scientists support them. The passive smoking scare is another. If SEPA prove unable to produce genuine proof that their radium paint is actual paint they would be another. The papers are full of "reports" by "researchers" about the dangers of salt, salmon, having short fingers, what we would evolve into if we spend 100,000 years etc all based either on "statistical research" of asking about 30 people or extrapolating some well known principle beyond any validity. Or creationism which is neither more nor less cargo cultism than the rest.

I ran across Feynman's remark backtracking a google hit on my article about Professor Hulme's article in the Guardian about "post normal science" which fits the definition with a particular emphasis on the alleged duty of the scientist to fix his conclusions to fit the preconceptions of those in power with its conclusion that " scientists ... must trade (normal) truth for influence". There is an awful lot of it about.

So by Mann's very act of refusing to make the algorithms of his Hockey Stick fraud public or by refusing to say what experimental proof they have, or don't have of the radium being paint SEPA have proved that they are not scientists but merely advertising flacks doing cargo cult science. The only question remaining is whether, by the standards of advertising flacks their advertising is honest or dishonest.

Or creationism which is neither more nor less cargo cultism than the rest.

We creationists admit we are practicing a religion, the Global Whining fanatics pretend to be practicing science. Unlike Al Gore's pet theory Christianity, including creationism, can form the basis of a productive society. The strict Calvinist Puritans were able to carve out a new colony from a barren wilderness, something that would violate environmental laws nowadays, and that no ecobureaucrat could hope to equal.

As for the cargo cult meme, I briefly tried to attend college locally at a junior college and most of the beginning freshmen took anthropology as a first year course. I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of all American freshmen take the same course using the same book. Part of the book seeks to organize religions of the world and in the process depreciates the role of Christianity in forming the West.